Blind Trust
by LadyRhiyana
Summary: Experimental fic, DG. "Malfoy trusts you, Miss Weasley, and look what it's going to get him."
1. Chapter 1

A/N – The first three chapters of this are reposts. Before I took this story down I had five chapters, but technical failure (yes, I also forgot to save them) saw the last two vanish into thin air.

Thanks to DH, this is now completely AU. But when has that ever stopped me?

Disclaimer – I don't own Draco, Ginny, or anything else HP. I don't pretend to own anything.

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**Blind Trust**

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**Prologue**

_Florence. _

_The warm, golden light poured in through the windows of the small palazzo, illuminating her white, set face, burnishing her beauty to a rich, golden glow. Draco watched, outwardly impassive, as that perfect, flawless countenance twisted and cracked, and her true feelings were revealed with disastrous clarity. _

_Inside, he felt as though he, too, was breaking apart._

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**Five years later…**

"'Ware! Aurors!"

The warning shout echoed through the cold, winter air, sending a shocking current through the gathering. They sprang into action, whipping their wands out; no untrained foot soldiers, these, but hard-bitten veterans of long, long years of war. In the veiled midnight air, they scattered into the forest, black-cloaked, flitting through shadow and half-light, hoping to escape their pursuers in the shifting, elusive fog.

Slipping cautiously through the trees, sliding around leaves and thin branches that would have caught disastrously at his robes, his heart beat with ice-cold steadiness, and his mind worked with the patient, hard-learned cunning of decades of combat. If he ran, they would sense the movement and follow, running him down and tearing him apart like hounds with a fox.

And so he sank down in the shadows and waited, holding himself perfectly immobile.

Soon enough the pursuit rushed past him, the forest growing still and silent. But experience had taught him the value of extreme caution, and he so held his position. Long after the animals resumed their normal routines, he finally stepped cautiously out from shelter.

A twig snapped behind him.

Reacting purely on instinct he whirled, throwing himself to the ground –

"_Avada Kedavra!"_

He evaded the full force of the curse. But the residual energy hit him with all the force of a speeding freight train…

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"We have him," an anonymous, faceless man murmured, a small, gloating smile curling the edges of his mouth. "We have Draco Malfoy."

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	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer – **I don't own HP, any of the canon characters, concepts or settings. Don't sue.

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**II**

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_The darkness disoriented him. Thick, stifling, overwhelming, there was nothing to hold on to, nothing to anchor him and tell him what was real and what was not. _

_He could not remember. _

_He could not…_

_He was…_

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The rush and mayhem of St. Mungo's was all too familiar to Ginny Weasley. She'd spent the last eight years as an emergency medi-witch, racing to treat an endless succession of curses and horrific wounds, inflicted with growing savagery by Auror and Death Eater alike. The longer the seemingly endless war dragged on, the worse the retaliations and reprisals became, until there was no longer any real difference between either side.

And tonight was just another example: a major Ministry offensive that had turned into a blood bath. She'd been up for nearly forty hours, operating on men, women and children alike, most of them innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. She'd treated a six-year old girl, earlier, her sight ripped away by a savage blinding spell that had ricocheted from an Auror's spell shield…

"Ms. Weasley, may I speak to you for a moment?"

Ginny looked up, jerked out of her reverie. Pushing her sleeves back up impatiently, she focused her attention on the speaker, a blank-faced man in anonymous black robes. "What is it?"

"Moody would like to speak to you," he said, his voice full of official self-importance.

She sighed. Alastor goddamned Moody. "What, has another poor prisoner hanged himself in his custody?"

The messenger frowned, clearly not appreciating her bitter temper. "It's important, Ms. Weasley."

"It's always important to him," she muttered. Taking off her healer's smock, she washed her hands and headed towards the door. "Come on, then. Let's go."

The messenger led her to a room in the High Security area of St. Mungo's, where the most dangerous patients were kept separate from the rest of the hospital. There were Unspeakables everywhere: grey, anonymous, and completely impassive, they watched her with avid, calculating eyes, and it sent terrible chills down her spine.

Swallowing, she moved into the room, automatically noting the hospital bed with its lone, still patient, surrounded by beeping monitors and machines.

"Come in, Miss Weasley," Moody's gravelly tones ordered. "Do you recognize this patient?"

No stranger to sick patients, she moved closer, curious, and then gave a harsh, choked off cry –

"So you _do _recognize him," Moody growled, satisfaction oozing from every pore.

There was no mistake: it was Draco. The pale, overbred face, once so mobile and cynical – yes, she could see the remnants of it now, the ruins of his vital, shifting intelligence.

"Why did you bring me here?" she asked hoarsely, unable to hide her reaction.

He watched her, that rolling, blinking eye cold and cynical, his face hard and determined. "June," he said, "2006."

She froze. He knew.

"I was in Florence," she answered, trying not to sound defensive. "Working at San Giovanni hospital."

"Yes," he agreed, "and you were also fucking the most vicious young predator of Voldemort's new generation…"

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	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer – **I don't own HP, any of the canon concepts, characters or settings. Don't sue.

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**III**

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Ginny had learned a terrible lesson in discipline and self-control, long, long ago, reinforced by basilisk venom and chicken's blood. In the years since then, she'd kept almost fanatical control over her thoughts and impulses – except once.

Once, only once, had she ever given in and let her heart overrule her mind.

And it had almost ended in disaster.

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"What do you want?" she demanded abruptly, not reacting to his harsh, crude accusation.

"I want many things, Ms Weasley," he said dryly. "I want an end to this war. I want to see every single Death Eating bastard cut down like the cowardly murderers they all are. But I'll settle for your cooperation."

"You've kept silent about Florence for five years, Moody. You could have brought it up at any time – why wait until now?"

"Because I didn't need you before. And now I do." His eyes strayed to Draco's pale, unmoving form. "Malfoy holds all the secrets of Voldemort's Inner Circle – if he ever wakes from his coma, and if we can ever get him to talk."

She began to see the outline of his intentions.

"You think he trusts me so much?"

He turned back to her. "I know he will never be more vulnerable than he is at the moment. And I know that – at least for that one month – he was so infatuated with you he would have done anything you asked." The sardonic, contemptuous curl of his lip was all too eloquent. "He will wake, if you call him. And he will speak, if you play your cards correctly."

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"…_aco? Draco? Can you hear me?"_

_He could hear the voice, far, far away, the faintest thread of sound in the endless, numbing blackness. Something deep inside of him stirred…_

Moody watched them both, the worn, weary mediwitch, and the broken, mostly dead Death Eater. She sat on the edge of his bed, her hand resting lightly on his, her head bent down to hear his labouring breath, and her thick, choppy hair finally escaped its restraints and fell around them both, a copper-bright curtain to shield them from the rest of the world –

Suddenly uncomfortable, he looked away.

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	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer – I don't own any of the canon concepts, characters or settings. Don't sue.

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**IV**

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_**Florence**_

_It was madness. _

_Both of them knew it. But still he kept returning to her, slipping through her window in the dark night, stripping off his thick black robes – sometimes still stained with blood – to lie beside her. She welcomed him, the weight and warmth of another body, and in the darkness she could ignore the coppery smell of blood and death. _

_If she wept while they moved together, punishing him by raking bloody furrows down his back with her nails, and if his dreams were unsettled and troubled, then neither of them complained. He tightened his hold on her, and she held him while he tossed and turned – _

_False comfort or no, it was better than nothing._

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_And then one night, it became dangerously real. _

_Coming home weary and jaded from the hospital, she strayed, slipped into his world, the back streets and alleys, the covert world of Death Eater ambushes and Auror retaliation. _

_She was exhausted: that was her only excuse for not noticing the soft scuffing of stealthy footsteps, before and behind her, or the hair-raising certainty that she was being watched, that something (someone) meant her harm. The attack, when it came, took her completely by surprise._

_Ginny Weasley, however, was made of stern stuff. She managed to fight off four of them, her wand-work strong and confident, before the fifth disarmed her and knocked her down. She fought strongly, but it was not enough; in the end, she found herself on her back, thrashing desperately, winded and unable to draw breath to scream – _

_A flash of eldritch green light, a vicious curse, and Draco Malfoy dragged her to her feet._

_That night, they moved beyond games. _

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	5. Chapter 5

A/N – Thanks to all my reviewers. Feedback is always greatly appreciated.

Disclaimer – I don't own HP. Don't sue.

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**V**

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For a moment, he stirred. His lips parted, his eyelids fluttering, and Ginny leaned forward, her heart pounding.

But then he subsided, the coma dragging him under once more.

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"I think it would be best if you leave me alone with him." Squinting in the morning light, Ginny pulled her hair back and tied it as best as she could. "I don't want anything to distract him while he's trying to return."

Moody fixed her with his roving, magical eye. "Quite frankly, Miss Weasley –"

"Why did you come to me at all, if you don't trust me?"

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"_Ron! What are you doing here?" Laughing, she threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly. "I haven't seen you in ages."_

_He smiled a little, strained and weary. "The Ministry sent a team over to help the Italian Aurors. There are rumours going round that Malfoy is here, in Florence."_

_She blinked. "M-Malfoy?" Her voice shook, just a little. _

"_He's a vicious murderer, Ginny – he's killed ten men that we know of, and Merlin only knows what the true count is. So be careful, will you? You know how much he hates our family."_

_When Draco slipped through her window that night, she asked him if he could remember their names and faces, all those men he'd murdered in the name of his Lord. She wanted to punish him, and punish herself – _

_Coldly, relentlessly, he laid their names at her feet, sixteen of them: thirteen men, two women, and a young girl who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he spoke he was calm, composed; it was Ginny who wept, Ginny who held him tight._

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"_Trust _is a very dangerous word these days, Miss Weasley. Malfoy trusts _you_, and look what it's going to get him. –And doesn't that raise all kinds of interesting questions."

She flinched. "I have never betrayed the Ministry."

"And I'll make damned sure you never will, Miss Weasley. Believe me."

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"…_aco, please, it's Ginny. I need you to come back…"_

…_Ginny?_

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